I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.
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2012's Top 10 Games - The Best For The Family Holidays

The air is thick with end-of-year best-ofs, so I thought I might do something a little different. Many of us will be spending the holidays out of our natural environment, at the home of our parent, parents, in-laws or other relational group.

Which is all very festive, but can prove a little stressful at times – and tends to limit severely the possibilities for recreational gaming.

(Anyone able piously to insist that they have never felt any desire to sneak off and kill some aliens while visiting with their relatives has my respect and polite incredulity.)

So, I sought to put together 10 games from 2012 which fit the profile for holiday gaming. This is not my top 10 of games for the year – which would include such treats as Borderlands 2, which requires too much time and too much hardware to play.

Instead, these are games which, for the main, can be played on whatever PC technology you might find at your hosts’ place (assuming they are not gamers, but have bought a computer in the last few years) or on a laptop you might have brought with you – so, nothing with exorbitant graphical demands, and nothing requiring a dedicated console. Further, I have limited myself largely to games which do not take a prohibitively long time to download and are either brief or can be easily picked up and put down as the situation demands.

Some of you will have dedicated mobile devices, of course – my colleague Erik Kain has you covered with his best mobile games of 2012.

With those criteria in mind, let’s take a look at ten gaming snacks that can be enjoyed between the main courses of conviviality and social interaction.

Ostensibly science fiction, Analogue: A Hate Story delves for its story into Korean history, and specifically the comparison between two periods, to inform its story of an investigator searching through the archives of a long-lost generation ship. Guided by ghosts in the ships machine – a pair of artificial intelligences guiding the player through logs and letters from the missing would-be settlers – a story emerges of repression and cultural decay.

Wordy and unusually flavored, Analogue feels like a potential evolutionary path for the text adventure, with a strong sense of the digital novel and an impressive tinkering with the user interface. A curiosity, it will run on any Mac or PC of recent generations, and has a demo for those who wish to try it out before buying.

Analogue’s manga stylings and focus on relationships between women may be a turn-off – in many ways, it is the game that weird dudes on the Internet are afraid the tyrannical rule of feminists will force all games to become.

Kawaii desu GAH! - Analogue: A Hate Story (and yes, I know)

And if that isn’t an argument to check it out, I don’t know what is.

For those who like a good mystery but are not so keen on the manga stylings, Love’s first game, Digital: A Love Story, is available as a free, pocket-sized download for Windows, Mac and Linux, and offers a story of romance and intrigue on the pre-WWW Internet of 1988.

Created during the one-hour game jam at the Rezzed PC gaming festival curated by Eurogamer and Rock, Paper Shotgun, Awake has been my go-to example of what a good idea expressed within its limitations can do. It is almost impossible to say anything about it without spoiling the gameplay, but it plays in a web browser and the entire experience lasts for little more than a minute.

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Hotline Miami listed under an article with a title that includes “Games for the Family” is a bit ironic, seeing as how it is not even close to family friendly. Consider a more careful choice of an article title.

I’d assume that a reader would grasp the concept of “family holidays” – i.e. holidays spent with the family. I mean, if I read an article called “recipes for Welsh rarebit”, it would be odd of me to assume it was in fact a scandalous document encouraging me to cook and eat the Welsh. That last word counts…

It’s not very professional to rely on assumptions. History has shown that simple phrasing of a line can have immense ramifications, so it is wise for a writer to choose words with as little ambiguity as possible.

You raise interesting questions, the first response to which is probably that there’s a limit to how far ambiguity _can_ be excluded (before we even get onto whether that is always a desirable aim). Somebody could read an article about Call of Duty; Black Ops 2 and see in it a coded message telling them to run naked through Leicester Square on St Stephen’s Day, for example, and that would be very probably more about them than the article.

Contrariwise, those who read this article (which contains no such coded message, I should add) will see the phrase “this is not a game for children” in the opening paragraph of the section on “Hotline Miami”, as well as comparisons with entertainment products specifically made for adults, such as ‘Scarface’. This seems to me – and would seem, I think, to somebody applying the conventions of written English in a reasonable fashion – to be pretty unambiguous.

Relying on assumptions is certainly dangerous, however. You have assumed, for example, that this article’s title includes the phrase “Games for the family” – incorrectly, as it happens, and empirically so. The title is “2012′s Top 10 Games – The Best For The Family Holidays”. It is a subset of the “2012′s Top 10 Games” lists various Forbes contributors are composing, specifically addressing one use case – the family holidays.

You have further assumed that this phrase, which does not actually occur in the title, means the entire family is being encouraged to play these games. This is again unambiguously contradicted by the actual text of the article.

These games are, unambiguously, being proposed for adult gamers to play themselves while separated from their usual gaming setup by familial obligations over the holidays, but not for families to play together – note the phrase “sneak off and kill some aliens”, as a metonym for a range of actions involving removing oneself from the social sphere (sneak off) to play a game (kill some aliens). So, these are – again, unambiguously – games for playing while taking a break from socialising with one’s family.

So, your understanding seems to be based on a misreading of the title and assumptions based on that, rather than on reference to the actual content of the article. I think a writer has to decide at a certain point how far to clip their wings to address eccentric readings, or readings not based on the text itself, as part of their practice.

In this case, the conclusion you have drawn does not relate significantly to what I have written, or with the generally understood meaning of the phrase “the family holidays”. A “family car”, to draw a comparison, is not one driven by the entire family, including children, but rather one in which the family is, generally or severally, conveyed. A good game for the family holidays need not be one played by the entire family – that would be “a good game for the family”, “a good family game” or “a good game for all the family” – three phrases I demonstrably did not use of Hotline Miami. Indeed, Hotline Miami is specifically identified as not a game for children – but rather one suitable for being played (sc. by the reader of the article, an adult reader of Forbes.com with the means to purchase games) during a holiday in which the family is involved (specifically, the winter holiday, where families often travel to meet in a particular location, thus removing some members from their customary gaming setup), while not directly interacting with the family (having “snuck off” – the metonymic uses of which are discussed above).